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I once read a comment here or reddit explaining that the X11 developers moved to Wayland because the X11 code has turned into an unmaintainable mess that can't

I once read a comment here or reddit explaining that the X11 developers moved to Wayland because the X11 code has turned into an unmaintainable mess that can't be worked with anymore. So the reasons are not drama, but just plain old tech debt.

deleted 11mo ago
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noosphr 11mo ago
Openbsd has brought in x11 into their own codebase: https://xenocara.org/ https://xenocara.org/ This is why openbsd is great. I don't care about the drama that happens in Linux land at all.
gh02t 11mo ago
The drama was mostly over whether or not Wayland should have been the replacement. AFAIU, everyone agreed X11 development was effectively unsustainable or at least at a dead end.
- silon42 11mo ago
  Wayland is not a solution, just a name for some protocols... It's either KDE or Gnome (with it's weird quirks) or some alternative.
  - gh02t 11mo ago
    So is X11, though the reference implementation of X11 is also widely agreed to have some serious problems going forward on top of problems with the protocol itself.
gldrk 11mo ago
This pre-packaged talking point is often repeated without evidence. The vast majority of X.org developers, including all of the original ones, simply moved to other venues at one point or another. Only a few, like Daniel Stone, have made contributions to both. And it shows in how many lessons had to be re-learned.
- cycomanic 11mo ago
  What is your evidence? A quick search on google (and the git commits) would show you that many wayland developers are significant former xorg developers. 1. Kristian Høgsberg the founder of wayland, did all the DRI2 work on xorg before becomming frustrated 2. Peter Hutterer was a main xorg developer and has been behind the wayland input system 3. Adam Jackson, long time xorg maintainer essentially called for moving on to wayland https://ajaxnwnk.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-abandoning-x-server.html https://ajaxnwnk.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-abandoning-x-server... (I found that he was involved in wayland discussions, but not sure if he contributed code) 4. you already mentioned Daniel Stone The only main xorg developer not involved in wayland arguably could be Keith Packard, although he made a lot of the changes for xwayland so I'm not sure if it is correct to say he did not have wayland involvement. So who are the "vast majority of X.org developers"? I think people always read about the couple of names above and then think, "well there must have been hundreds of others", because they thought xorg was like the linux kernel. AFAIK xorg always only had low 10s of active developers.
  - gldrk 10mo ago
    My evidence is the git commit log: https://desuarchive.org/g/thread/84460945/#q84481507 https://desuarchive.org/g/thread/84460945/#q84481507 This doesn’t even include the XFree86 CVS commit history and older, which accounts for most of the code in X.org. Some of those people may actually be dead now. >AFAIK xorg always only had low 10s of active developers. There are 38 people with 100+ commits, which obviously counts as a major contributor.

deleted 11mo ago

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noosphr 11mo ago

Openbsd has brought in x11 into their own codebase: https://xenocara.org/ https://xenocara.org/ This is why openbsd is great. I don't care about the drama that happens in Linux land at all.

gh02t 11mo ago

The drama was mostly over whether or not Wayland should have been the replacement. AFAIU, everyone agreed X11 development was effectively unsustainable or at least at a dead end.

silon42 11mo ago
Wayland is not a solution, just a name for some protocols... It's either KDE or Gnome (with it's weird quirks) or some alternative.
- gh02t 11mo ago
  So is X11, though the reference implementation of X11 is also widely agreed to have some serious problems going forward on top of problems with the protocol itself.

gldrk 11mo ago

This pre-packaged talking point is often repeated without evidence. The vast majority of X.org developers, including all of the original ones, simply moved to other venues at one point or another. Only a few, like Daniel Stone, have made contributions to both. And it shows in how many lessons had to be re-learned.

cycomanic 11mo ago
What is your evidence? A quick search on google (and the git commits) would show you that many wayland developers are significant former xorg developers. 1. Kristian Høgsberg the founder of wayland, did all the DRI2 work on xorg before becomming frustrated 2. Peter Hutterer was a main xorg developer and has been behind the wayland input system 3. Adam Jackson, long time xorg maintainer essentially called for moving on to wayland https://ajaxnwnk.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-abandoning-x-server.html https://ajaxnwnk.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-abandoning-x-server... (I found that he was involved in wayland discussions, but not sure if he contributed code) 4. you already mentioned Daniel Stone The only main xorg developer not involved in wayland arguably could be Keith Packard, although he made a lot of the changes for xwayland so I'm not sure if it is correct to say he did not have wayland involvement. So who are the "vast majority of X.org developers"? I think people always read about the couple of names above and then think, "well there must have been hundreds of others", because they thought xorg was like the linux kernel. AFAIK xorg always only had low 10s of active developers.
- gldrk 10mo ago
  My evidence is the git commit log: https://desuarchive.org/g/thread/84460945/#q84481507 https://desuarchive.org/g/thread/84460945/#q84481507 This doesn’t even include the XFree86 CVS commit history and older, which accounts for most of the code in X.org. Some of those people may actually be dead now. >AFAIK xorg always only had low 10s of active developers. There are 38 people with 100+ commits, which obviously counts as a major contributor.